Introduction
The Open Source Community rock
Getting hooked up to a WebService
More on Liferay
Now, installing Liferay portal on Kattare. Where do I start?
My Liferay Portal
Sample portal-ext.properties config
Sample Liferay Portlet Install Tips
Introduction
If you have already installed an instance of the LifeRay Portal, you can visit my Liferay FAQ Page. This page details the pitfalls I encountered attempting to install the Portal. For example, how does one configure the Portal? Where can you find the config files and which pieces do you need to over-ride. I'll provide the pieces I had to over-ride and they should (generally) speaking be the same. Also, how does one configure DB access and so forth. I'll have links to the official forums as well.
If you haven't got the basic install in place and want to know where to start, read on. This document details the steps I followed to get my Portal up and running on a Paid Service. You may have your own boxes so you can skip forward to the end of the article where I show the running Portal. It occasionally is down as I work on it so please return later if you get no response.
Personally, being a software guy by profession I have been pretty frustrated with GooglePages, not because of what it offers but who it's targeted at. I've reached the point where I can't do much more with it - unless they expand it in a large way. I want access to DBs. I want to build powerful apps. I want to control who can visit my site. I want them to register etc; I want it to plug and play modules or whatever. I want a content management system so I'm not swimming in html and css. Essentially, I want to own my own Portal. Now, if you add up the dev time required to write this from scratch you'll quickly realize you simply can't do it alone. You need to be part of a team.
The Open Source Community rock and are here to serve you
So I searched the open source community and there are a few portal implementations out there. The one I've chosen is called Liferay and so far I'm totally impressed. I have it installed on a machine behind my firewall so I can't show you a working link for now but you can view a live demo on the website but it's limited.
Getting hooked up with a WebService
I've had to bite the bullet on this one and put my hand in my pocket. I've signed up to a paid service which will host the install. Currently, I've just registered so it'll be a while (week or so before I'm setup.) Santa Claus and New Year's festivities may slow my progress on this side of the pond. However, after MUCH research I've gone with http://www.Kattare.com. It looks very professional and is Java and Servlet based. (Later I'll take a look at Ruby on Rails but that's for another Blog post.) I had signed up with a free service called EatJ but they removed my account as I didn't use it enough and I found them cheap and cheerless. I'm making no predictions about Kattare. It's going to cost me $29 per month on their 3.1 plan which gives me my own Tomcat instance and ssh amongst other features. This is where I'll install Liferay and configure it.
**Update, I've been with them 12 months now so I'll recommend them. I've done lots of price comparisons so they're about the same as the competition and haven't let me down so far. A good rule of thumb is to try out my instance and see how responsive it is. Longer term, I hope to move to their professional plan $39 but for now I'll stick with 3.1 as I get two DBs and can play with other projects. For some reason, Tomcat is one of the more expensive installs. If you're looking for a $4.99 solution, best move over to PHP or Ruby.
More on Liferay
It uses the MIT licence so it can be used for commercial use. The way they make their money is from donations and consultancy from what I can see plus I guess if you're an eager beaver software person it can't harm in a job interview to have worked on this. The list of features is very impressive technically and I won't go into them all for now. High-points are it uses the Portlet design pattern, spcifically JSR-168 Compliant Portlets. This puts a smile on my tekkie face and it means other companies and eager talented software folks can contribute and integrators can pull together powerful uses of this technology. Also, it comes with a drag'n'drop interface for the selected Portlets using a Web 2.0 style interface so it's an excellent blend of the old and new imo. Anyway, next step is to install on Kattare. I'll develop a few example Portlets and allow strangers to login and play with it.
Well that's the plan for now. Enjoy those holidays!
Ok, it's the new year and I've setup two 'Hello World' applications on Kattare. I won't bother showing you these but suffice to say, one is a Java Servlet solution and the other is a Ruby On Rails application. Each technology have their own advantages in terms of what one would like to achieve. First, I'll attempt to get the Liferay Portal up and running on Kattare. It may take a while as I have other stuff on. Suffice to say, when it is there, I'll post a link here and show what can be done with it; re customization and so-forth.
Ok, it's Jan 2007 and I've finally managed to install the Liferay Portal on Kattare. First my impressions of Kattare as a service. Technically, it's up to scratch. Few problems I've noticed with the service. (a) The message boards are pre-historic, many are only as recent as 2004. Maybe I have misunderstood but either people aren't posting or I'm not getting something. (b) Customer service. When they do reply they are excellent. By this I mean, there appears to be an email quota. They will reply but they won't reply to every email. Then again, maybe my requests were not very coherent or didn't make sense from their perspective. However, on the upside I am impressed with their tech-savvy knowledge. So it's not all bad. I've also noted that the server which has lots of good reviews of them is hosted by them. A conflict of interests perhaps? Am I going to drop this service. For now, no way! They are good. The important thing to note is they are busy. I have not tried their phone service as yet. Note: You'll need to register your context with Kattare when you deploy your Tomcat instance. This is required. The advantage is that you also have PHP, Ruby on Rails support etc; So it might seem a little painful but it's worth it imo.
Now, installing Liferay portal on Kattare. Where do I start?
I installed the WAR file which is more work. You can setup a simpler version which has the tomcat piece as well. I did this initially and got it to work but it's no good on your web service. However, if you've a dev box locally, it's a good starting place. Back to the Tomcat install. I setup the service using MySql. My 3.1 account has this and it's sufficient for my needs. There are scripts to create the tables etc; I eventually found a properly created set of install instructions. Look at the liferay.com web site main page. You'll find the instructions there. I deployed the WAR and was hit with a ton of errors. The first hurdle to overcome is the need to configure the portal for your intall url. You have to create your own portal-ext.properties file. Next, you need to add some context parameters to your servlet.xml file. I had to crack open the portal-ejb.jar file to find out what the existing portal.properties file contained to see what needed to be over-ridden. I also reworked the index.html to point to my non-ROOT war file. The fruit of my work is here.
Now, installing Liferay portal on Kattare. Where do I start?
So what's next. Well this is just the front door. I'm the admin. So I'm going to configure a new community next and setup it's look and feel. This is where the win is for this software. This is next next task. Also, I will build my own Portlet and show how this can be integrated into the community. So, it's going to take a while. I'll update this entry when it's done.
In a previous article, I discussed how to install the Liferay Portal. Now, that I have it up and running, the next step is to begin customizing it. This is not an easy task. The Portal is reasonably powerful but they've only recently added fine grained access control for Portlets and so forth. Here are some of the customizations I've done.
1. Created a community called BlokeFood
2. Tweaked the guest page to have my own content
3. Implemented a sign-on which does not redirect but stays at the same page.
4. Hot-deployed an RSS and Flickr Portlet. The RSS Portlet did not work but I have the default one.
5. Created a series of Child pages
6. Added Portlets which use Google Gadgets! This is seriously COOL!
7. Put in place my own Google Adsense code
I don't have time right now to go into all of how this was done. For now, I'll just provide a link to show what can be achieved. This may change over time.
The Portal is also setup so that a stranger can login. This may not work well as the things one sees when one is not a guest is not the same as when one is a guest (not logged on.) I have not fully figured out how to control the logged on experience for a stranger. It's next on my list. I'll let you know when I do!
The Liferay Guest Page with small additional text.
The BlokeFood Community example pages
Longer term I'll place all the articles on my googlepages site or whatever site I'm hosting this info. Hopefully, I'll use the Liferay Journal Facility to show you what can be done with it. One step at a time!
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